


I Could Have Heard You in the Halls

by anniebibananie



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Canon, F/M, Goodbyes, Post-Battle, This Is Sad, Tumblr Prompt, theon is dead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-02
Updated: 2019-05-02
Packaged: 2020-02-16 06:50:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18686323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anniebibananie/pseuds/anniebibananie
Summary: Sansa allows herself a minute to think on what might have been before sending Theon on.





	I Could Have Heard You in the Halls

At some point in time, probably somewhere after her father was murdered in front of her eyes, Sansa had started giving herself moments. It was too hard to think about tragedy all the time, if she did she would have been consumed long ago, but she was able to give herself a minute to think on what could have been before she had to try to keep moving forward. 

She remembered after the Freys murdered so much of her family, she had given them each a minute in her head. She thought about Robb as a father. She thought about holding his son. She thought about hugging Talisa, showing her around the walls of Winterfell. She thought about the nights she would let her mother brush her hair again, and the way they would talk about their family as if nothing had changed to tear them all apart. Then, for fear of losing herself to the what if’s and the could have been’s, she tried to place those minutes in a box and bury it away in the back of her head. 

Here, looking at Theon before they send him back to his sister to be buried by her, she was terrified to give herself a minute at all. She did it anyways. 

At first, her mind went to his return to her just a few days prior. It had felt as if she had gotten a piece of her home back, a piece of  _her_ back, when he was in her arms. She didn’t know if she loved him in that way, but there were times she thought for a moment that maybe she could have. That, if given the time, she could have had a future with the man who understood parts of herself no one else ever really would. 

When her mind went to what could have been, her first thought of was Theon a little fuller, with hair and face cleaned and bathed. She imagined walking into the hall to break fast and him being there. She imagined sitting across from him and getting to talk about nothing and everything. What they would do that day, how to bring Winterfell properly back to its former glory. He would be able to help her remember parts of the castle she had forgotten. 

_Callused hands reaching for a cup, stopping halfway there to come across the table instead and hold her wrist between his fingers. A squeeze, a reminder, then back to his side. Laughing eyes and a tentative smile._

First, though, he would have come back from battle. He would come back from the Great War, and she would have held him tight to her. His hair would tickle her ear, and she would place a kiss on both of his cheeks. Reunions had always made her weak even when she was determined to be strong. Maybe, when he pulled back he would have kissed her firmly on the lips. Perhaps she would have kissed him back. 

“ _I needed to wait to do that,” he would whisper, foreheads resting on one another. “I wanted to give you all of me.”_

_“You came back.” She cupped his cheek with one hand, and the other held itself over his chest so she could feel his breathing. Alive, alive, alive spoken with each pulse.  
_

Loving Theon would have been easy, probably. There was no need to explain when it was the two of them. They could hold one another when it got dark, and they could speak words when they needed to be away from the silence of thoughts. 

“ _Come to bed, Theon,” she said, smiling over at him from underneath the sheets as he stared at the flames. “No more ghosts tonight, please.”_

_He crawled in after her, wrapping his arms around her stomach and pulling her into him, kissing a delicate spot behind her ear._

She imagined watching him in the yard training again as she had watched her brothers and him in her youth. All of them could sit around a table—Theon, Arya, Bran, Jon—and the dirty past would be gone. They could talk about only the things they missed. They could all start to make new memories together again, and it would be family. 

Sansa wanted to stop there, but she couldn’t halt the onslaught of so many small, impossible moments. Too many thoughts spun in her head like her strings of twine tangling together in her basket, her fingers nimble but not nearly enough to separate them again. 

_His hand on the small of her back. His smile as he reunited with his sister. Cersei dead and gone, and the two of them sharing a smile that finally spoke to true peace. Waking up and watching his resting features. Inside jokes and whispered secrets and knowing someone was on your side, above anyone else’s, no matter what was to come._

_“I love you,” he would say, and she would know it to be true.  
_

Her chest constricted, and she held a hand to the ache as she breathed in deep. She had given him more than a minute, but maybe she could allow that small thing for a man she nearly loved entirely. She was glad she had given his last night to him. 

“Goodbye, Theon,” she said as she reached out a hand and pet back his hair. For a moment she could trick herself he would pop up, saying something through a twist of his lips that was neither smile nor smirk. She could not dwell further on maybe’s, though. There was still too much to be done. “Thank you.” 

She bent forward and kissed each eyelid. Then she kissed his lips, brief and barely there. In another life, it would have been first and not an only. Here, she gave it to him once and that had to suffice for being more than never. 

**Author's Note:**

> find me on tumblr: [anniebibananie](http://anniebibananie.tumblr.com/)


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